Note: A video recording of this lesson is available as a reel on our Facebook page that can be accessed via this link.

Another important Google Ads feature that can show your ads to irrelevant people and, obviously, waste your advertising budget. This time I’m talking about the location options that you can find in the main settings of your campaign.

It’s pretty easy to select your targeted locations in the Locations tab, however, many people don’t pay proper attention to the additional location settings that are kind of hidden below the main settings. In order to open them up you need to click on the blue link that says Location options.

By default, the system helps to increase your reach and targets both users who are physically located in your chosen cities, states or countries and also those who have just shown interest in the locations that you have added.

In other words, these people can be located anywhere in the world and in many cases, you really don’t need it.

To sum it up, in case your business model implies showing ads to people who are really physically located in your targeted locations, make sure your edit the settings and select the second option that says Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.

Additional tip regarding reporting:

By the way, if you want to take a look if your campaign has already served in some irrelevant locations, unfortunately, you won’t be able to do this in the main part of the interface by selecting your campaign and then opening up the Locations tab. (not Settings that we’ve talked about before).

Location report in Google Ads

It’s a pretty wise trick from Google to show there only locations that you’ve really specified in your campaign. In order to see the full picture you will need to enter Reports (there is an icon at the top of your screen) and create a custom report by adding the relevant columns such as Country/territory, Region, City.